Guns and (Character) Assassination

Using terror

National Review Online. December 21, 2001 9:30 a.m. More by Kopel on
.50 caliber guns.

It
was only a matter of time before the gun-ban lobby took advantage of
Americans' fears of terrorist attacks to scare them into giving up
more of their rights. Gun banners are now rushing to demonize the
latest politically incorrect sporting gun — the .50-caliber target
rifle. The Washington, D.C.-based
Violence Policy Center
(VPC) now equates .50-caliber hobbyists with gunrunners for the
Taliban. The VPC has posted on its website a frantic report
www.vpc.org/studies/roofcont.htm aimed at .50-caliber shooters.

The VPC report
makes much of its "evidence that Al Qaeda bought 25 Barrett .50
caliber sniper rifles" in the late 1980s. But not mentioned is the
fact that at the time of the transfer, the United States was
supporting Afghanistan's mujahedeen against the Soviet puppet
government. All the mujahedeen were America's allies then.

The VPC states:
"Nor do we know whether the guns were sold directly from the factory
or through a dealer or dealers." In fact, these rifles were paid for
and shipped byte U.S. government. Explains Ronnie Barrett,
president of Barrett Firearms (in Murfreesboro, Tenn.), "Barrett
rifles were picked up by U.S. government trucks, shipped to U.S.
government bases, and shipped to those Afghan freedom fighters."

After the VPC
report came out, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms visited
Barrett's plant and confirmed that the late-1980s sales were in
full compliance with the law, as all of Barrett's sales have been.

Arguably, the
VPC could plead ignorance for the content of its October 2001 report,
which insinuated that Barrett Firearms knowingly sent guns to al
Qaeda. But now, the facts have come out showing beyond any doubt that
Barrett's sale was to the U.S. government, and that it was the U.S.
government that took the guns to Afghanistan. Yet the VPC has failed
to correct its original report, and so the initial charges against
Barrett remain on the VPC website.

Even in the
context of the often-acrimonious gun-control debate, the VPC's smear
is astonishingly mean-spirited. Imagine if, in 1951, at the height of
the Korean War, a pressure group claimed that "The Jones Corporation
sold rifles to the Soviet Communists!" while omitting the fact that
the sale was actually to the United States government, which then
shipped the guns to the Soviet army — in 1943, when the U.S. and
U.S.S.R. were allies against Hitler.

Character
assassination and deception are nothing new for the VPC, which takes
much greater liberties with the truth than does, for example, the
Coalition to Stop Gun
Violence. The VPC spread the blatantly false
rumor that Professor John Lott's research was "in essence, funded
by the firearms industry." Even the Washington Post reported
that this charge was untrue.

A report by the
General Accounting Office summarizes the 18 cases in which a
.50-caliber firearm has ever been connected to a criminal, such as an
illegal alien accumulating firearms. (Report no. OSI-99-15R, revised
Oct. 21, 2001.) The VPC presents these cases in the most lurid manner
possible — though it would be possible to present similarly lurid
stories for almost any other caliber of firearm, and there would be
far more than 18 cases. Indeed, if the VPC hated swimmers as much as
it hates gun owners, it could produce another report detailing each of
the two dozen murders by drowning which take place every year.

The VPC has
been trying to start a holy war against the .50-caliber shooting
community since 1999. Their congressional allies — Chicago's Rep. Rod
Blagojevich and California Sen. Dianne Feinstein — have sponsored the
"Military Sniper Weapon Regulation Act" and have denounced .50-caliber
target shooters as "terrorists, doomsday cultists, and criminals" (in
the words of Sen. Feinstein).

In reality, the
owners of these big guns are the exact opposite of the villains
Feinstein and Blagojevich want us to believe they are. Most are like
John Burtt, a retired police officer with the demeanor of a
Sunday-school teacher.

As spokesman
for the Fifty
Caliber Shooters Policy Institute, Burtt has the task of undoing
the hatchet job of folks like Feinstein, Blagojevich, and the VPC on
the sport of .50-caliber target shooting. In testimony before
Congress, Burtt explained that the typical participant in the sport of
.50-caliber target shooting has the demographic profile of… a golfer.

The average
.50-caliber enthusiast is a successful businessman with an annual
income of $50,000 or more. Of the 3,200 members of the Fifty Caliber
Shooters Association, at least 75 are physicians.

As civilian
experts on .50-caliber technology, the association freely shares its
research findings with law-enforcement and military authorities.
Knowledge developed through the civilian sport of .50-caliber
long-range target shooting has played an important role in the
development of .50-caliber rifles for military use. This is part of
the broader pattern of the historical development of American
firearms, in which the civilians and military users of firearms have
worked together constructively, with important benefits to both the
military and to sport shooting.

The VPC,
though, claims these are "men in states of arrested adolescence."

Are .50-caliber
target rifles lethal weapons? Certainly. But so is a .458-caliber
rifle, and so is a .475-caliber rifle — both of which are very
powerful hunting rounds. If gun prohibitionists want to argue that
rifles which have barrels .50 inches in diameter are too big, but
rifles which have barrels .475 inches in diameter are great sporting
guns, let them make that argument. If they want to argue for banning
.50-caliber guns as a first step towards banning .475, .458, and any
other calibers they can ban, let them make that argument too — but not
with hysterical claims that .50-caliber weapons are somehow utterly
different from other guns.

Mary Blek,
President of the "Million" Mom March, asserts that the Founding
Fathers would have had no use for a .50-caliber rifle (Nov. 28, 2001,
McKendree College debate). Actually, the common guns of the early
American republic were larger than .50 caliber. The Queen Anne
Colonial Musket (manufactured around 1670-1700) was .812. That gun was
supplanted by various versions of the English Brown Bess musket, which
was .75 caliber. America's French allies supplied the Patriots with
the .70 Charleville Musket. The Dutch muskets bought by the Americans
were .65 caliber.

Domestic
production of the French-pattern .70-caliber musket began in 1795,
with the American Springfield Musket. The famous Kentucky Rifle (a
name eventually given to most rifles made by German immigrants) was
usually .60 to .75 caliber before 1780, and .50 caliber after that.
American rifles and muskets in the period from the Revolution to the
Civil War tended to run in the .54 or .69 range.

As for pistols,
the standard British service pistol after 1760 — carried by cavalry
and by officers — was .69 caliber. French pistols were standardized in
1777, at .67. Many American pistols manufactured for militia,
self-defense, and other uses in the first decades of the 19th century
ranged from .50 to .69 caliber. Deringer made very compact pistols in
.52 and .54 — "pocket rockets" indeed.

In other words,
a great many of the guns which were most commonly owned and known in
early America were at least.50 caliber.

Nor did
large-caliber guns become uncommon later. In the latter half of the
19th century, classic American manufacturers such as Winchester,
Remington, Sharps, and Maynard produced many rifles in the .50-caliber
size or larger — including the Winchester Spencer Carbine, the
Remington Model 1871, and the Sharps Side-Hammer Rifle. Harold
Williamson's book Winchester(1952) lists 19 types of
ammunition manufactured by Winchester, in calibers of .50 and above,
between 1876 and 1939.

Like modern
.50-caliber rifles, the 19th century models had long-range power.
Marksmen used the .50-90 Sharps rifle to kill Indians a mile away. And
these guns could be quite powerful, since some were designed for
buffalo hunting. (The Indians, of course, had .50-caliber firearms of
their own; Geronimo's collection included a Springfield .50-70 M1868
and, possibly, a Spencer .56-46.)

Nineteenth-century antique guns are, understandably, treasured by
their owners, who tend to be loath to fire them. While such guns may
well have been used in frontier crimes long ago, they are in very
peaceful hands today. Yet Sen. Feinstein's "Military Sniper Weapon
Regulation Act" (S. .505) would impose severe restrictions on these
.50-caliber collectors, under the claim that they pose "a serious and
substantial threat to the national security." Targeted by the
Feinstein bill would be antiques such as Remington, Springfield,
Spencer, and Sharps firearms dating back to the 19th century, since
they are centerfire guns firing .50-caliber cartridges.

Some of the
types of ammunition whose firearms would be treated like modern
machine guns under the Feinstein bill include:

Ironically, in
1994, Sen. Feinstein pushed into law her ban on so-called "assault
weapons." Her law was titled the "Public Safety and Recreational
Firearms Use Protection Act," and contained a list of several hundred
models of "recreational firearms." Included in her list of benign guns
is the Barrett Model 90 Bolt Action Rifle — a .50-caliber target
rifle. Yet Sen. Feinstein's new bill claims that "these firearms are
neither designed nor used in any significant number for legitimate
sporting or hunting purposes and are clearly distinguishable from
rifles intended for sporting and hunting use."

So the very
same guns that Sen. Feinstein lauded in her "Recreational Firearms Use
Protection Act," in 1994, are now said to be "clearly distinguishable
from rifles intended for sporting and hunting use." One suspects that
firearms stay on her personal list of "good" guns only so long as
there is no political opportunity to urge their prohibition.

Gun-prohibition
advocates are free to make the case for The Incredible Shrinking
Second Amendment — to argue that that the Second Amendment today must
not be allowed to protect guns which fire bullets in sizes that were
ubiquitous when the Second Amendment was written, as well as in the
century that followed.

But what
gun-prohibition groups should not do is to make outrageous and
vicious smears against the hobbyists who shoot .50-caliber rifles, or
against the companies that supply these target guns. Such tactics are
reprehensible anytime, but in wartime, false accusations of
near-treason are as unacceptable as anthrax hoaxes.

We have
repeatedly told gun-rights activists that it is their responsibility
to rein in those who use improper tactics (such as telephoning
pro-control politicians at home late at night). It is now time for the
responsible elements in America's gun-control community to insist that
the gun-control battle be fought with legitimate arguments — and not
with the character assassination of innocent Americans.

Update 2/25/02
When this column was written in December, the Violence Policy Center
had produced no evidence to address the October statement of Ronnie
Barrett, the head of Barrett Firearms, that the Barrett rifles which
went to Afghanistan were sent as part of a U.S. government program.
Mr. Barrett's statement was reported in the Associated Press shortly
after the Violence Policy Center released its "Voting from the
Rooftops" paper.

On February 13, 2002, the VPC put out a
short
paper offering more evidence for its claims. The new paper
consists mainly of quotes from the testimony of an Al Qaeda member who
testified in federal court about the Barrett rifles, and of the VPC's
summary of statements which the VPC claims were made to the VPC by
U.S. foreign-affairs officials, none of whom are named.

Readers will have to make their own judgments about the credibility of
a terrorist's sworn testimony, regarding events from about a decade
earlier. The VPC paper puts a great deal of effort into parsing the
precise phrasing of the terrorist's testimony, although such heavy
reliance on the exact word choice of someone who is almost certainly
not a native speaker of English may not be warranted.

As for the reported statements of U.S. officials, it is difficult to
assess the reliability of anonymous statements, particularly when the
statements are filtered through an organization which, in my opinion,
has a poor track record for honesty and accuracy.

The VPC has made outrageous and ridiculous
personal attacks on John Lott. The VPC has made grossly
distorted claims about the records of concealed carry permit
holders in states such as Texas-reporting, for example, that concealed
carry permit holders had been arrested for homicide, but failing to
note that cases had been dismissed because the permit holders were
acting in lawful self-defense. The VPC's book about the American
firearms industry is written by Tom Diaz, the self-described former
"gun nut" who also wrote the VPC's paper on .50 caliber firearms. The
book contains a
variety of errors about ammunition and firearms which appear to me
to be unlikely to be the product of a former gun enthusiast.

Hypothesizing that the VPC accurately and fully reported what the
officials said, it is also true that an official's admitting to having
participated in a program which resulted in the transfer of weapons to
bin Laden could cause a very serious career problem for the official.

Still, the new VPC paper is a commendable step forward, because it
finally responds to Mr. Barrett's October statements. I encourage
people to read the VPC's new paper, and to make their own
determinations about credibility.

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